Encroachment of Sharia Speech Standards Is Noted

The sensible folks in the editorial office of Investors Business Daily have compiled a useful list of recent assaults by Muslims on free speech in America. It’s a disturbing trend that needs to be watched and resisted.

Using intimidation to eliminate criticism of Islam is a big part of stealthy incremental sharia implementation[1]. The imagined future America of Muslims is one where citizens can gripe about Congress but no dissenting word may be said about Mohammed, Islam or burqas.

Islamofascism: Islamists have launched a hostile takeover of American language through an increasingly aggressive and organized censorship campaign that threatens free speech.

Over the past few weeks, there have been an alarming number of cases of Muslim pressure groups trying to force Americans to conform to a pro-Islamic speech code.

They’ve insisted on censoring any speech or expression that offends them, including TV ads, Christian symbols, speeches and even parts of speech.

In some cases, the targets of their wrath have caved in to their demands.

• Last week, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Worcester, Mass., canceled a talk on Islam by author Robert Spencer after local Muslim groups, egged on by Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, enlisted a sympathetic Boston Globe reporter to smear Spencer as a “bigot.”

• Last month, Hooper penned a column demanding the Associated Press drop from its new Stylebook the word “Islamist” to describe militant Muslims who support jihad and Islamizing the West, such as members of the Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR itself. He doesn’t like the “pejorative” ring to it, accurate as it is.

CAIR already got the U.S. government to scrub the term. Now it’s bullying the press not to use it.

• CAIR at the same time is running ads on buses in Chicago and San Francisco redefining the term jihad. The whitewash campaign, dubbed “MyJihad,” aims to convince Americans that jihad merely means “to struggle,” not wage war.

• Speaking of ads, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and the Muslim Institute for Interfaith Studies joined forces last week to condemn as “racist” a light-hearted Super Bowl commercial featuring an Arab walking through a desert with a camel. Coca-Cola dropped everything and consulted with the groups on bended knee.

“We did express regret that the ad had been misunderstood,” Coke said.

• Islamist groups like CAIR are feverishly trying to insert their own word “Islamophobia” — into the popular lexicon. They use this term, ad nauseam, to describe anyone who speaks critically of the violent nature of Islam.

• Recently they petitioned the United Nations to take action to limit free speech when it’s deemed offensive to Muslims, citing a “striking increase in Islamophobia.” They hope to one day criminalize it, and they’re inching closer and closer to that goal.

• Swayed by such international pressure, the Pentagon last month ordered crosses and other Christian symbols removed from military chapels where our soldiers pray in Afghanistan. Why? They insult the local Muslims.

Crescent moons and other Islamic symbols are perfectly fine, however, and will remain at the mosques the U.S. has erected on those same bases for Afghan interpreters and security trainees.

Here’s what’s really outrageous about this trend: In many cases, the Muslims demanding greater respect for Islam are the very reason it gets such a bad rap.

Some of the same Islamic groups arguing that their religious rights supercede everyone else’s free-speech rights have actually been read their rights as terrorist suspects.

Several former officials of CAIR, for example, now sit in prison on terror-related convictions.

And the Justice Department has ID’d its founder and the entire organization itself as unindicted terrorist co-conspirators, after linking them to both the terrorist group Hamas and the radical Brotherhood in the largest terror-finance case in U.S. history.

Unless Americans want to live under de facto blasphemy laws, they’d better start standing up to these Islamofascists.